Friday, 28 November 2014

Alumnae and alumni of the department who read CAM magazine will happily have absorbed the article by Dr Rosalind Love in this term's issue. For everyone else, we point you to the magazine's website, where the current issue can be read online or downloaded for free. In 'Wars of the Word' (pp. 35-37), Dr Love tells of her research into the deeply intriguing Life of Saint Eadburg, a Latin text preserved in a twelfth-century manuscript from the cathedral library at Hereford, but which shows tantalising similarities with the work of a much earlier writer.

Thursday, 20 November 2014

When modern people read a medieval text, they do so through
a modern edition, which has been put together through consultation of the
manuscripts. When there is more than one manuscript of a text, they will
inevitably be different in some way, and it is the task of an editor to sort
out which readings from which manuscripts to use in an edition – and even if a
manuscript is in general good, we may find places where other, generally
‘worse’ manuscripts may offer better readings. When a text has been edited
before, naturally editors want to have access to manuscripts their predecessors
didn’t know about, so finding a ‘new’ manuscript is a bit of a dream come true.

For the past two years I have been working on a new edition
of the ninth-century text the Life of Anskar, an account of one of the
first Christian missionaries to Denmark and Sweden which provides us with our
earliest descriptions of life in Viking-Age Scandinavia. It was last edited in
1884 by Georg Waitz for the Monumenta Germaniae historica (the Trillmich
text that is often cited is a reprint of Waitz with an abbreviated critical
apparatus). When I started, I was aware of two manuscripts of the text Waitz
had not known about, one in the monastery of St Agatha near Cuijk in the
Netherlands (which I refer to as F in my edition, from its provenance
from Frenswegen in Germany) and one in Heiligenkreuz in Austria (which I refer
to as N, from its previous location in Neukloster and origins in
Bordesholm, the successor to the earlier monastic settlement of Neumünster –
see discussion below and also the table of manuscripts at the bottom of
this post). Both of these were discovered in the nineteenth century. I’m now
pleased to report that I’ve come across another version of the text unknown to
previous scholars.When I sat down to write the section of my introduction that
dealt with N, I wanted to learn as much about its history as possible:
where and when it was written, where its copyist found the version of the Life
of Anskar he copied. The first two questions were both fairly
straightforward, as at the top of the contents-page, the scribe wrote: Liber
sanctae Mariae uirginis in Bardesholm ordinis canonicorum regularium sancti
Augustini Bremensis diocesis. Quem ego frater Johannes cum naso scripsi in
diuersis annis. Oretis dominum pro me unum aue Maria. (This book belongs to
St. Mary’s in Bordesholm, of the order of regular canons of St Augustine, in
the diocese of Bremen. I, Brother John with the Nose, wrote it over several
years. Say one Hail Mary for me.) And although he only tells us that he wrote
the book in diuersis annis, he does write the year after some of the
texts in it: he doesn’t do this for the Life of Anskar, but for the Life
of Rimbert, which follows, he gives the year 1512. This Johann Ness or
Johannes cum Naso copied numerous other volumes at Bordesholm and won the
praise of nineteenth- and twentieth-century textual critics (such as Bernhard
Schmeidler) not only for his prodigious output but also for his diligence as a
copyist: for some later works, his text is clearly the best.

Thus it was clear that N was copied at Bordesholm. I
set about to see if there was anything I could learn about its library, and
found that there was, fortunately, rather a lot: not only had relatively many
of the volumes survived (though only a fraction of what there was once), most
of them now in the Kongelige Bibliotek in Copenhagen and the Universitätsbibliothek in Kiel – no
mean feat as the Reformation, the Thirty Years’ War and other conflicts could
completely destroy libraries – but among them was a medieval catalogue of the
library, completed in 1488 (which you can see online here; a later catalogue is bound in front of it, the medieval portion begins on
page 26). This allowed me not only to establish that Bordesholm had an earlier
copy of the Life of Anskar, in a volume which bore the shelf-mark L ix,
but also the other contents of that volume, among which were a life of Thomas
Becket and Provost Sido of Neumünster’s
Letter on the Church of Bremen, written in 1195 or 1196. This means that
(if this volume was written as a whole, and did not have parts written at
different dates stitched together) L ix could probably not be older than c.
1200, but was written sometime before 1488 when the catalogue was made.

With this established, I tried to find out just what had
happened to L ix, or if (just possibly) it might still be out there somewhere.
I found several works from the nineteenth century that dealt with the fate of
the Bordesholm library between the secularisation of the monastery in 1566 and
the foundation of the University of Kiel in 1665, when the remaining books were
transferred to new library there. The single largest other destination for the
books was Gottorf Castle in Schleswig, the ducal seat, from which they were
later transferred to the Kongelige Bibliotek in Copenhagen. Copenhagen’s
manuscripts have been thoroughly catalogued, but the Bordesholm manuscripts at
Kiel, I found, had last been catalogued in 1863, in two pamphlets published to
celebrate the birthday of the King of Denmark – the last time that date would
be marked with any public festivities in Kiel, as in the following year the
Duchy of Schleswig was incorporated into the Kingdom of Prussia.

The last person to write on the subject I could find was
Steffenhagen (Die Klosterbibliothek zu Bordesholm und die Gottorfer
Bibliothek. Kiel, 1884), who identified L ix with N – but I knew
this could not be so, as not only had N not yet been written when the
catalogue was made, but the two did not have the same contents. But the first
person to print the medieval library catalogue of Bordesholm, Merzdorf (Bibliothekarische
Unterhaltungen, Neue Folge. Oldenburg, 1850) tentatively identified L ix
with no. 297 of a later catalogue of the Bordesholm library (made sometime in
the mid-seventeenth century before the collection was transferred to Kiel).
This meant that if Merzdorf was right, there was a possibility that L ix had
made it to Kiel after all: indeed, Steffenhagen identified no. 297 with a
manuscript at Kiel with the designation Cod. ms. Bord. 95.

What further ignited my curiosity was Steffenhagen’s
description in which he denies the manuscript could be L ix: ‘Von Ratjen als
Sermones bezeichnet und nicht identificiert. Mit L ix des alten Katalogs nicht
identisch, welcher Codex jetzt in Wiener-Neustadt liegt.’ (Called Sermones
by Ratjen [author of the 1863 catalogue] and not identified. Not identical with
L ix of the old catalogue, which is now in Wiener Neustadt.)

It was the words nicht identisch in particular that
set me off – this suggested that the volume had not identical, but similar
content – in other words, it could be L ix, which shared some content with N,
but not all (and as I mentioned above, I knew Steffenhagen was wrong about L ix
being N). I became even more curious when I turned to Ratjen’s 1863
catalogue and only found the description: ‘Sermones. 187 Bll. 4. Die Handschrift hat von Feuchtigkeit sehr
gelitten.’ (Sermones. 187 pages, quarto. The manuscript has
suffered badly from damp.) Evidently, it was in a bad condition and neither
Ratjen nor Steffenhagen could be troubled to report its contents.

The only thing to do then was to see if someone at Kiel
could give me further information. To my good fortune, an internet search
revealed that only last year a project had begun to produce a modern catalogue
of the Bordesholm manuscripts. I got in touch with Kerstin Schnabel of the Herzog August Bibliothek in
Wolfenbüttel, who is
working on the project and who has written a dissertation on the Bordesholm
library.

She was able to tell me that, in fact, L ix is still lost,
and it did not live on as Cod. ms. Bord. 95. But the latter did, among other
things, contain a copy of The Life of Anskar! Although the manuscript
(from the fifteenth century) is severely damaged by water and mildew (it seems
Ratjen was understating things badly when he merely referred to Feuchtigkeit),
she told me that the contents-page is at least still somewhat legible, and
lists the Life of Anskar at folia 170 to 178. This indicates it must be
a condensed version, notably shorter than the abbreviated version to be found
in the manuscript I designate F in my edition (from Frenswegen in
Germany, now just across the border in the Netherlands at Sint Agatha,
Erfgoedcentrum Nederlands Kloosterleven, St Agatha C 13), but not to be
confused with the short legend which only takes up a couple of pages (of which
Kiel also has a copy in Cod. ms. Bord. 3).

Thus, this manuscript provides us with evidence of a
hitherto unknown shortened version of the Life of Anskar, which although
it may not be of the greatest value as a witness to the original text, will be
able to tell us more about how the Life was known in later medieval
northern Europe. I would suspect that the text may be related to F,
which also shares some significant variants with a seventeenth-century copy of
the text in Amiens (which I call m). But in any event I will have to
wait to find out, as the manuscript needs to be restored first. Ms Schnabel
told me that the pages are all badly mildewed (and moreover, are fragmentarily
preserved and have come out of their proper place in the manuscript) and
cleaning them and putting them in order again will be a time-consuming process,
which will begin next year as part of the ongoing project to catalogue the Bordesholm
collection – which, no doubt, will turn up other things of great value to
medievalists interested in northern Germany and Scandinavia.

Table of manuscripts mentioned

F Sint Agatha (Netherlands), Erfgoedcentrum
Nederlands Kloosterleven, St Agatha C 13. Fifteenth century, originally from
Frenswegen in Germany. Contains a version of the Life of Anskar,
abbreviated by the omission of several chapters. Discovered in 1894, ten years
after the publication of Waitz’ edition.

m Some seventeenth-century pages added to Amiens,
Bibliothèque Louis Aragon, 461 (a Corbie manuscript from around 1300; the first
few chapters of the Life of Anskar was removed at some point. The writer
of these pages supplied the missing text from a manuscript which shares many
variant readings with F, and added the note telling us the name of the
cleric he thought had taken the missing leaves).

L ix the lost exemplar of N, from Bordesholm,
probably written sometime between c. 1200 and 1488.

Kiel, Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. ms. Bord. 95. Fifteenth
century, collection of saints’ lives, including Anskar. The full contents are
still unpublished.

Monday, 17 November 2014

The journey may have been somewhat tedious, and the sky menacingly dark
on arrival, but such trivial matters were soon forgotten in face of a fantastic
weekend of papers on medieval Wales, spanning the fields of history, literature
and archaeology. Opening proceedings with the J. E. Lloyd lecture was Dr David
Stephenson, examining ‘Empires in Wales: from Gruffudd ap Llywelyn to Llywelyn
ap Gruffudd’. Despite paying tribute to him as one of the greatest historians
of medieval Wales, Stephenson nonetheless sought to deconstruct Lloyd’s
narrative through demonstrating the complexity of power relations in the ‘age
of Princes’. His stimulating lecture pinpointed many avenues for future
research, raising questions over the articulation of power, presentation of
rulers, and ideological control.

On Saturday morning Dr Alex Woolf attempted to relocate Gwynedd. Using
a mixture of inscriptions and evidence from the Historia Brittonum he argued for the moving of the heartland of Gwynedd
eastwards, in a paper which left many pondering the implications of his
alternative map of Wales over their coffee. Dr Sue Johns and Dr Emma Cavell
broached questions of identity and perception, with the former examining the
way seals were used by noblemen and women to convey identity, and the latter
looking at later depictions of Matilda de St Valery as a giantess and witch by
the Welsh. An introduction to the ‘Seintiau Cymru’ project by Dr David Parsons
drew morning proceedings to a close.

As tempting as it was to linger over lunch, the afternoon promised to
be as stimulating as the morning, with papers covering homage (Philip
Fernandes), Welsh law (Dr Sara Elin Roberts), education (Dr Rhun Emlyn) and
chronicles (Georgia Henley and Dr Owain Wyn Jones). In an exceptional analysis
of the poetry of Llywarch Brydydd y Moch to Llywelyn ab Iorweth and Rhys Gryg, Dr
Rhian Andrews examined the role of the poet as an ambassador, deconstructing every
line of the poetry and placing it in its historical context. Her analysis of
the purpose of the poetrywas
fascinating, and her readings of the Canu
i Rys Gryg so powerful and convincing as to recreate Rhys Gryg’s court in
the Sir Ifor Williams Room in Bangor.

An early start on Sunday morning saw two different approaches to the
study of places, with Dr Philip Dunshea discussing the meaning of ‘Eidyn’ in
insular texts, whilst Paul Watkins deconstructed charter evidence in an attempt
to locate the land of the Abbey of Pendar in Senghennydd. After a paper by Richard Suggett concluding
that the high status hall was re-created in the peasant household, Professor
Tim Thornton brought proceedings to a close and dragged us forward to the early
modern period in an examination of English historiographies of medieval Wales.

The breadth and depth of the papers on offer at the Seventh Bangor
Colloquium on Medieval Wales was truly astonishing, and whilst Professor Ralph
Griffiths joked that the organisers (Professor Huw Pryce and Dr Euryn Rhys
Roberts) would not want to start thinking about the eighth colloquium for some
time, I for one would already like the date for my diary.

About Me

This blog is written and maintained by members of the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic, University of Cambridge. We study the history, languages, literatures and material culture of medieval Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia.
For more information about us go to: http://www.asnc.cam.ac.uk